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Wasteland 2 has been released to great acclaim, earning Game of the Year from PCWorld, and reaching #1 on the Steam sales charts. Now, the Director's Cut comes as a free PC update to all backers as our thanks for making the game happen!

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Take your time! Dont litsten to guys like Stephen! I´ve been waiting for a game like this for years, ever since I played Fallout1/2, KOTOR 1/2 and dragon age. And you guys must have waited even longer to get this game made.

PS I miss Van Buren though, wish it were finished and not canceled right before the goal line...

Turn based RPG here we go!

Take your time, I´ve been waiting years. I want you to deliver the best you came in regards to your budget, don´t worry about time I can wait longer :)

This project was supposed to be done this month! Quit lollygagging and get the product out! Snap out of your analysis paralysis and get the product out when you promised! The idea was top stay true to the flavor of the original Wasteland with upgraded graphics, can't be that hard! DO IT!

How about something like what Shadowrun Returns did? They display a grid that tells you "Moving to anywhere in this section will cost you 1AP. Moving anywhere in the next section will cost 2." and so on. maybe with an option that highlights "moving up to this point will leave you with enough AP to make one attack with your currently equipped weapon. Move beyond this line and you can't attack."

Superbacker

It seems that the dialogue between backers and inXile will remain open and clear till the end, so it's likely we'll have a perfect game. inXile has experienced designer, we have experienced gamers. I'm pretty sure a lot of great things will come out from this synergy. And please, don't listen picky people ;-)

>Moving diagonally in the calculation costs 1.5 times as much as a straight movement.

As far as I understand, you have considered 1.4 (approximate square root of 2), but changed it to 1.5 so it will be easier to calculate how much AP is needed for movement (3 AP for 2 ticks; instead of 7 AP for 5 ticks, which is awful to implement).

@someone - because of limited resources. i understand where you're coming from and you're right in so far as i don't know whether they can do both. if they can, if they have surplus resources where at the moment they say "hmm...we got 100k $ and dunno what to do with them because all that is important to us is fine" - then rock and roll for stances. my argument is indeed only valid if it is, in fact, a question of where the existing, limited resources should go to.

I'm quite happy for no stances if it'll be that much effort. As someone else said, this isn't Jagged Alliance, the straightforward-ness of the combat is really appealing to me. I also won't mind if they ARE introduced either!

@The Echo Inside: To make it really circular you would have to work with 1.414... which would make calculating movement costs while looking at the grid nearly useless.

Without a grid the computer would calculate the cost and you would often be fine-tuning the walking distance to leave you enough for that shot you want to do. Lots of mouse-shifting. Grid-based means you often know how far you can go with one short glance.

In short grid and gridless both have advantages and disadvantages, 1.5 fits grid better.

@Motik: No project can please everyone. You might have the wrong expectations, WL2 was never planned as the successor of FA Tactics (or JA).

I think my main concern in the demo was the unrealistic amount of blood that leaves a character every time they take a hit. Personally, I prefer to imagine that most bullets are damaging their armor or grazing them, rather than leaving a huge hole, but the character is still walking around somehow.

Nice to see these things addressed, even though I wasn't too worried. Still a little confused about the grid system, but my impression is that units can move diagonally for 1.5 times the cost of moving in a cardinal direction. Makes sense. Hexes might have offered even more flexibility, though my main reason for wanting hexes was simply aesthetic. But when it comes to grid or no grid for the underlying movement system, I definitely prefer a grid. Even if it is less flexible, I think it makes for more tactical gameplay, because the system at work is very transparent to the player. It's much easier to judge distances, and quickly get an idea for where each character will be able to move in an engagement, and how many AP they'll have left when they get there.

I think I would prefer no stances. I thought it was cool in Fallout Tactics, but that game seemed visually more sloppy in some ways in comparison to the originals, and perhaps stances had something to do with that. As stated, the amount of work to do it right seems excessive.

Love the new track. Most of the music so far sounds exactly like what I would imagine it to sound like, which is a good thing.

I think the guys at inXile do this for a living and stuff. Whereas all the rest of us just play the games. I'm glad they listen to us and I can see the improvements. I'm also glad they ignore us at times too.

I don't quite understand why you have to go grid based anyway. The grid, whether hex or square should just be an optional informational tool and not the basis of your movement and combat system. I would be far happier for you to drop it entirely than be constrained by the inherent limitations of a grid based system.

I also see that our hero's seem to suffer from that strange affliction that seems to affect everyone in RPG's, the inability to scale a knee-high fence, wall or rock.

@inXile: i do not care at all for stances. if the choice is more polishing/missions/content OR stances - then by all means don't do stances! this is not jagged alliance!!! if you feel that many people want stances then make a survey and tell all those people that it is not just about "are stances important to you" but that it's about "do you want us to use a big amount of resources that could be spent elsewhere (content/ploshing etc.) to implement this totally new, untested feature?".

In the demo, the characters already take a knee when behind half-height cover. Surely, then, you already have that animation available; I was just watching it! I can see how prone would be too much work, but I'd like to see being able to take a knee (and gain a small accuracy + ranged evasion bonus / melee evasion penalty) for 1 AP (and the same to stand again). Yes, it will take some extra time and effort, but I'd rather the game be more full-featured than soon.

Superbacker

@motik you have never worked on a development project have you? COD 4 had 100 MILLION dollars are is still a regurgitated FPS with more updated textures. Money is not everything, Are you willing to wait for the devs to move the timeline back 1 year just so you can see your character crouch ?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and explanations with us, it's covered all those questions that popped out in my mind while watching the last video. Anyway, you guys have my full confidence as professionals:).

@JackDandy 1AP Diagonally wouldn't work I'm afraid. Imagine walking 2 squares north and 2 east. That would equal 2 diagonal moves to the north-east. So everyone would use diagonal movement at all times :)

Great update. Glad to read about these subjects, I was really wondering about them as well.

Although, having 1.5 AP for diagonal movement just sounds kind of strange. Wouldn't it work better like in the boardgame Descent, where every step is just 1 AP, diagonal or not?
But, if you say it makes sense gameplay-wise in the game, I can take it.
Glad to hear you're aware of the demo\animation issues too.

Anyway- PLEASE do an update on overworld movement soon! I really wonder about that.

@Cefu : Good feedback, and I agree. Maybe move cost could even be calculated using Pythagoras, at all times?
@Motik: What excuses? Those were perfectly good arguments for not jumping head-first into what may not seem like a big decision, but could create visual problems and add quite a lot of time to development.

+1 for using SQRT(2) instead of 1.5. You guys obviously did the math back in Wasteland 1 to come up with the 14' distance of enemies standing diagonal from you.

Even better would be just make the AP cost based on the actual center to center distance of the start/end squares. I understand needing a nice, pre-determined place to land (the squares) but why should movement costs be based literally on moving iteratively from one to the next? I know calculating real distances is slightly more expensive than adding (e.g. 1+1+1.5+1+1) but it's not like the engine is doing it over and over for thousands of objects so the difference is NOT significant.

Another way to look at is for X number of AP diagonal=1.5 gives you a "star shaped" reach, diagonal=SQRT(2) gives you a mostly circular reach and real square to square distance calculations give you a reach as close to perfectly circular as possible. Computers are good at math, shoot for perfect.

I posted a question on the dev video on YouTube from the last update, but I guess those posts aren't monitored so I'll post it here too. It was mentioned in the dev video about the situation where you were attacked by the kid in the first Wasteland game after killing his (rabid) dog. This got me wondering if there will be children in Wasteland 2, and if so, will they be killable? I don't intend to go around killing kids in the game, I didn't kill that kid in the first game, I just evaded him until I got far enough that I could leave. Recent games like Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim have kids in them, but they're magically invincible. Fallout 1 and 2 had the kids removed in certain regions because they could be killed.

Even though the game is crowd funded, it will still be distributed by various digital distributors, so I assume it still has to be reviewed, rated and classified in various regions. I would hope that this won't mean that children are removed from Wasteland 2. It would be nice to have situations like in the first Wasteland where you may have to make the decision to kill a kid.

I understand the math of it, but in application it seems like it would be awkward... But, maybe I don't understand how they're implementing the grid/speed attribute then. I assumed cost was related in AP (with the speed attribute effects being a constant between straight/diagonal) and that it was basically a chess board.

Which would create sort of a star pattern (as the radius would differ), rather than a circle. But, maybe I'm missing an element of the application. (If it does end up being a circle, then, that's fine, but that's not how I interpreted the description)

I know this is a really picky math point, but with a square-based grid, shouldn't diagonals cost sqrt(2) as many action points? Since that's about 1.4, the 1.5 multiplier results in a small penalty for going diagonally. With this penalty removed, the result is a movement system that's arguably MORE flexible than a hex grid, because instead of getting 6 directions to move, you get 8 directions, with AP costs equivalent to proper euclidean distance.

I know in Fallout 2 (which I'm replaying right now thanks to Killap's recent release of the Restoration Project v2.2), the hex grid results in moves in certain directions costing a lot more per unit distance than others. A square grid with properly weighted AP factors reduces this problem.